To amplify RedWeasel’s very good answer, fstab runs as root and unless you specify otherwise, the share will mount with root as the owner on the local machine. From the perspective of the Samba server, it’s the Jellyfin user accessing the files, but on the local machine, but local permissions come into play as well. That’s why you can get at the files when you connect to the share from Dolphin in your KDE system—it’s your own user that’s mounting the share locally.

My only experience with homebrew is on macOS and I’ve switched to MacPorts there. Homebrew did some weird permissions things I didn’t care for (chowned all of /usr/local to $USER, if I’m remembering right). It worked fine on a single user system, but seemed like a bad philosophy to me. This was years ago and I don’t know how it behaves on Linux.

I also prefer Firefox, but when I need a Chromium alternative for testing, I opt for the flatpak (or the snap) version personally.

I’ve got one running in a Proxmox cluster. Getting it setup was a bit particular (due to the T2 chip if I remember correctly), but it’s be working flawlessly. I use the quick sync feature of the iGPU for my jellyfin container.

If you were going to buy something new, I think there are more cost effective boxes of about the same size and spec, but if you’ve got it already, you should definitely start playing with it.

Since you’re new to this and therefore probably haven’t set up too much infrastructure yet, let me put in a plug for ZFS for the file system underlying your data. That will unlock for you snapshots and the ability to send very efficient backups off site to another ZFS pool.

There are commercial offerings for all this (I think rsync.net will give you a ZFS target), but I essentially have a second NAS set up at another location for the purpose.

Beyond that, I’m also a big fan of BackBlaze B2, which can give you object-based online storage.

As far as what to back up, that’ll depend on your setup. I usually find it simplest to backup my entire VM and do recovery by restoring the VM.

I keep my dotfiles in a got repo and just do a git pull your update them. That could definitely be a cron job if you needed.

SSH keys are a little trickier. I’d like to tell you I have a unique key for each of my desktop machines since that would be best practice, but that’s not the case. Instead I have a Syncthing shared folder. When I get around to cleaning that up, I’ll probably do just that and keep an authorize_keys and known_hosts file in git so I can pull them to needed hosts and a cron job to keep them updated.

I haven’t noticed anyone else bring it up, but you mentioned in passing the possibility of using a RAID 0. I’d avoid that except in very specific circumstances. They’re potentially fine for a scratch disk type of scenario, but if any member of the array fails, the whole array is toast. The chances of a failure increases with was each disk added, so a RAID 0 is less reliable than a single disk. I definitely wouldn’t want to trust my family’s photos to it.

I think it’s just a matter of getting used to it. I had the same issue at first and the more I used the command line, the more I started to prefer it to GUI apps for certain tasks.

A couple things that I use all the time:

• tab completion is incredible
• cd - goes back to the last directory you were in (useful for bouncing back and forth between locations)
• !$ means the last argument. So if you ls ~/Downloads and then decide you want to go there, you can cd !$.
• :h removes the last piece of a path. So I can do vim /etc/network/interfaces and then cd !$:h will take me to /etc/network.

Another option that’s pretty much perfect as long as you don’t need to provide remote support for macs is Remotely (https://github.com/immense/Remotely). You can selfhost it and it works kind of like teamviewer, so pretty simple from the client standpoint.

This promises to be a fun project!

It sounds to me like you have above-average demands on your network and I’d agree that UniFi (and therefore probably Omada) are not what I’d consider great as routers/firewalls.

I’m a fan of pfSense/OPNSense for that purpose, which you can install on pretty much any x86_64 hardware. They’re both wonderful and you can fine tune to your heart’s content or get them set the way you like and leave them.

If you really like a dedicated router appliance, I do like the Mikrotiks, too, but you’d have to study their sometimes-peculiar way of doing things.

To my tastes, UniFi does great at switching and wireless, but any of you’re unhappy with that direction, I’ve heard good things about Omada and the Aruba stuff is fantastic. I recently have been playing with some used iap-325s from eBay. I picked them up for $25 and they’ve been terrific.